Repairing Trust in Domain Name Disputes Practices: Insights from a Quarter-Century's Worth of Squabbles

—The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) seeks to balance two competing goals: empowering trademark holders to swiftly address cybersquatting cases targeting their brands and protecting domain registrants from aggressive legal tactics by overreaching trademark holders. Since its inception, the UDRP has become the de facto dispute resolution mechanism for over two thousand domain extensions, a substantial increase from the original three. However, despite its successes, critics argue that the policy enables practices that undermine trust and fairness. Unfortunately, meaningful reform efforts have stalled due to the absence of large-scale structured data, limiting empirical evaluations and leaving foundational questions unanswered for more than two decades. To address this long-standing gap, we trained models to extract structured data from 90,153 UDRP dispute proceedings, enabling the most comprehensive empirical analysis of the policy to date. Our findings shed light on several issues, showing evidence of forum shopping in almost one-third of all the disputes, potential conflicts of interest in 43 cases, and delays (by many parties) that fall well outside the expected response times—all of which impact the perceived fairness and efficiency of UDRP. Beyond eroding trust, those issues create serious security challenges: 2,751 malicious domains remained under malicious actors’ con-trol for up to four months after a panel ordered their transfer. Overall, our findings underscore the need for policy reform to help restore trust and improve transparency in the Internet’s de facto standard for countering trademark infringement. Based on our discoveries, we recommend introducing greater automation, strengthening oversight, and enforcing clearer compliance rules to ensure that the UDRP remains a reliable tool for trademark-based name disputes—especially as the Internet continues to expand with new generic top-level domains and the digital environment becomes increasingly hostile to users.